Extract CSV data from PDF files with Tabula

Topic

Tabula, by Manuel Aristarán, came out months ago, but I’ve been poking at government data recently and came back to this useful piece of free software to get the data tables out of countless free-floating PDF files.

If you’ve ever tried to do anything with data provided to you in PDFs, you know how painful this is — you can’t easily copy-and-paste rows of data out of PDF files. Tabula allows you to extract that data in CSV format, through a simple interface.

It’s not the fastest software in the world, but it really is simple to use and it sure beats manual entry. You just load a PDF file into Tabula, which runs on your computer, highlight the table to extract, and the program does the rest. Save as a CSV and do what you want with it.